Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has endorsed a commonsense technical interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a law not usually given to such interpretation. Amazon had sued Perplexity AI to try to shut down its Comet browser, claiming the browser’s optional agentic AI “Assistant” that can browse websites like Amazon for comparison shopping purposes, violated the CFAA because Amazon did not “authorize” Perplexity to access Amazon users’ accounts. Rejecting that theory, the N
Record details
Published: 4 August 2026
Source: EFF Deeplinks
Category: Field notes
Topics: Regulation · Agents & autonomy
Retrieved: 5 August 2026
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How to cite this record
ethics.ai (4 August 2026), “Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA,” evidence record 16309, https://ethics.ai/record/16309 (originally published by EFF Deeplinks).
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